A flashlight beam strikes Jeremy’s undifferentiated face and Jeremy leans back and covers the cartoon ovals of his lidless eyes with splayed wet hands.
The cabbie scrambles to her feet and stands beside Niko with the lantern trained on Jeremy. With surprising speed and grace the creature leans forward and bats the lantern from her hand.
Niko lunges like a fencer and the prybar strikes resistant flesh. He pushes and feels a small pop as the prybar sinks into Jeremy’s side all the way up to Niko’s knuckles. Startled Niko lets go and steps back.
Red-edged in the cockeyed taillights Jeremy stands staring dumbly at the wrench head of the prybar protruding from his middle like a radio knob. Niko gets the clear impression of a frown. “No candybar?” Jeremy grips the knob and pulls the length of metal out. A great gout of indigo follows to spray in pulsing arcs as Jeremy examines the glistening prybar and says Awww. A pissing sound as gushing ichor strikes the tunnel wall. Awww. Jeremy lumbers away bleeding with the prybar dangling from his bigfingered hand.
The cabbie is still watching the retreating island of Jeremy’s back as she holds up a shapeless foilwrapped Chunky bar. “I was gonna give him one. I always carry em.”
Niko isn’t quite sure what to say.
The cockeyed headlights show a dozen more approaching shapes two hundred yards away.
Niko and the cabbie fetch the flashlight and quickly change the tire. The cabbie tightens the lug nuts and lowers the jack and heaves it in the trunk and slams the lid. She and Niko hurry back into the cab.
The engine won’t start.
“Don’t do this to me,” says Niko.
“We’ll take care of it.” The cabbie turns the key again. The engine catches and dies.
Niko looks at the approaching creatures. “I think you need more candybars.”
“It’s flooded.” She stomps the gas and turns the key and lets the engine turn over and lets up on the gas and stomps it again, somehow feeling for the timing, and sure enough the engine catches and chutters weakly a couple dozen revolutions and then picks up. She eases the cab back out to the middle of the tunnel and lines up with the rails and jerks the wheel left-right to make the cab hop up on them. “Nothin to it,” she calls back.
Ahead of them more Jeremys shirk from the light and slink against the tunnel walls as the cab rides past. One of them picks its scabrous nose with a soggy finger shoved in past the middle knuckle as if lobotomizing itself. Another swings a squirming rat by the tail like a bolo and lets go as the cab drives by. Niko hears it thump against the side of the cab.
“You all right?” the cabbie says.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Yeah. It’s like that down here.”
Niko’s rough slim hand caresses the curves of the hardcase beside him. No taillights shine before them now. Lot of catching up to do. He settles back on the seat and feels the old urge rise, the small burn in his stomach’s pit. And suddenly he wants a drink so bad he can literally taste it. Whiskey.
The drone of rails moans through the cab as he outstares the pitiless dark.
“L.A. RIVER OVERHEAD.”
Niko startles from his reverie as the cabbie taps the ceiling of the cab. He wonders if the Red Line runs beneath the river. How to know? Where he is could not be found on any map. Except perhaps the maps enscrolled in the collective dream of what may lie outside of life. A cartography of bone and laminate of blood.
In any case he understands the significance of crossing running water. In this deep place, in this conveyance, with this unyielding driver. Customs must be honored and passage must be paid in kind and sterling. So Niko pulls his driver’s license from his wallet and removes one of the two remaining coins taped to its back. Its glint dull in the tunnel’s phosphorescence. Drachma, lepton, obolos. He’d obtained them through an online broker to whom he gave thorough and particular descriptions. Metal, denomination, condition, age. Knowing from his research he would need to pay his way. But the coins when he received them proved upsettingly familiar though he couldn’t have said how. These transactions merely reenactments. By intimations and degrees he is coming to feel himself directed by an older self that has watched and planned and only let Niko know as much as he needs to. A wiser deeper self that even now is moved and moving him to action.
This coin is silver, stamped with the head of a gorgon. Niko presses it against his lips, then taps the cabbie’s sweatdamp shoulder with the coin and holds it out in front of her. She accepts the silver drachma without looking, bites it as tradition demands though also as a kind of cowboy joke, and flips it ringing into her change tray.
“Much obliged,” she says.
Niko pictures the dirty sluggish water running overhead, glinting in sunlight he may never see again yet still may come to dread glimpsing prematurely. He knows the light has played a part in ruining this quest before. But he hasn’t made this quest before. But he has.
He leans back in his seat and wonders why he isn’t more afraid.
VII.
WALKING THE DOG
“END OF THE LINE.”
Niko jerks awake and is startled to realize he has slept in the first place. Lulled by tire hum on narrow rail in shadowed tunnel. He feels faintly guilty. As if sleep betrays resolve.
He rubs his eyes and works a sluggish tongue around the sleep-taste in his mouth. He feels thick and slow, almost hungover.
The Checker Cab is idling with its engine knocking. Niko cranes forward to peer through the crudcaked windshield. Dull red intermittent light throbs like a painful wound, caressing bloodred highlights off the contours of the driverless Black Taxi parked beside a tall white marble wall that teems with figures carved in deep relief. Farther on along the sculpted wall an enormous wrought iron gate. On the lintel above the gate a red neon sign flashes.
Above the sign an enormous marble figure of a pensive devil perches thinking, pointed chin on taloned fist and huddled in his jointed wings. Horned and brooding.
Chained to an iron plate bolted to the wall beside the gate is a very big dog.
A few yards past the dog a wooden ladder leans against the marble wall. On it stands a largeheaded balding man with a full beard shot with gray. Mallet in one hand and chisel in the other. The mallet strikes the chisel and a moment later Niko dimly hears the sound above the engine’s idle cough.
Of the tunnel there’s no longer any trace. At some point they have emerged from it or it has widened to become this unfathomable cavern around them.
The cabbie leaves the engine running and gets out to open Niko’s door. Looking not at him but at the Franklin parked undamaged by the wall. Her expression one of mild hatred.
Niko emerges like a man who can’t believe he’s just survived some kind of epic accident. Preternaturally aware yet faintly disbelieving. He stands behind the yellow shield of opened door, barely aware of the cabbie beside him. Eyes only for that Franklin. That wall. That gate. That dog.
The dog is staring at the cab’s headlights as if contemplating pouncing. There is no certainty the tanklike Checker Cab would survive if it did.
The cabbie leans in and turns off the headlights and steps around Niko to pull his hardcase from the back seat. Niko steps out from behind the door and the cabbie nudges it shut with her hip while holding forth the hardcase. Niko accepts it and for a moment their gazes meet, flinty blue and walnut dark, and when their hands touch briefly in the transfer of the case’s handle from her grip to his he feels again a sense of ritual. The passing of a torch perhaps. Acceptance of a boon.